Crafting Short Stories

Tomorrow I will be attending an eight hour workshop, sponsored by Burrow Press, at Urban ReThink here in Orlando. The focus of the workshop will be the art and craft of writing short stories.

Writing short stories has been challenging for me for several reasons:

For one, I’m verbose. Extremely verbose. I could spend pages describing the scenery before I even introduce my first character. In fact, I’ve had teachers penalize me for “drowning them in words” when I should be more succinct and direct in my wording. This is a fault I’ve been working to correct since I began my degree.

Secondly, I struggle with the creative process as a whole. I’ve never been one to chug out new ideas quickly and, when I do come up with one, it tends to be complex – hard to wrap up in a perfect, 5,000-words-or-less package. When I do pull an idea out of the rusty shed that is my brain, it tends to be a BIG concept, aching for a 400 page novel layout.

For these reasons, I’ve signed up for the workshop. My husband thinks that I’m crazy for spending some of my few free hours off in a class – considering I am already in school! – but I feel that this is going to be one of the best days for my education as well as my professional career.

As a writer, you never stop learning, you never stop growing, and you never stop honing and developing your talents. The moment you feel you’ve “mastered your craft,” you’ve actually just lost touch with your words. I’m hoping to post one of the short stories I develop in tomorrow’s workshop up here on Sunday, so thank you in advance for any feedback or comments on my work.

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7 thoughts on “Crafting Short Stories”

Looking forward to reading any short stories you come up with! I have the opposite problem… short stories are what i’ve always written, now trying to get my head around my first novel. Good luck and enjoy the course!

Maybe we can help each other out? I can show you how I lay out my novels [I’ve just finished one and I’m working on a second] and you can tell me how you truncate your stories down into bit-sized pieces! 🙂

It was GREAT! I’ve actually been converting my original short story concept into a screenplay, which seems to work better – it’s a very visual piece. I’ll post an excerpt of the script soon. Trying to finish the first draft. 🙂